


Compromised

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Established Relationship, Everybody Lives, F/M, I have a lot of feelings, M/M, Multi, Spoilers, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-10
Updated: 2012-07-10
Packaged: 2017-11-09 14:06:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/456317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The thing about being a former assassin – or rather a formerly unofficial assassin – is that ‘compromised’ isn’t something you say lightly.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Compromised

The thing about being a former assassin – or rather a formerly unofficial assassin – is that ‘compromised’ isn’t something you say lightly. In fact, that word might be the only warning before people start getting hurt – people the old you would never have left behind to suffer like that.

Clint Barton might not have been a world-renowned killer on the Black Widow’s level – very few people are, and Natasha and Phil thumb through the latest claims for a laugh – but he certainly spent more than five years between the circus and SHIELD not really caring who was in his sights so long as somebody paid him for it. He doesn’t let it get to him the same way Natasha does, and sometimes that bothers him instead.

Natasha knows this; knows what Clint is scared he’s capable of. She talks about ledgers and the red to remind Clint in her own way of the world they can both slide into. Those words and their fights are their equivalent of her simply taking his hand and telling him that he isn’t alone. In that hut in Serbia, she let it slip, because she recognised something that neither of them would ever put into words; since then, she knows it helps to pull Clint back into himself, and helps her feel a little bit more human.

(Letting Loki into the loop is a gamble, but it pays off.)

Phil is technically responsible for both of them, since having one assassin vouch for another is apparently not as convincing as the two of them reckon it should be. Only technically though: officially, Agent Coulson was only ever Clint’s handler, back in the days before Fury decided Hawkeye was just prep for the real job of an entire superhero team. Natasha has never had a handler so much as sponsors. 

Clint had always insisted on there being more to her, even before the mission that changed everything. He still won’t say what it was he saw in the intel – all he’ll give SHIELD is that his job is to see things other people don’t. To his credit, he seems to have been right on that one. Phil took the chance of placing Clint’s knack for split-second personality analysis over orders, and after a discussion which will never ever see the light of day, was left holding the reins of responsibility. As ever, Phil might have faith in his agents, but Fury has faith in Phil.

Phil’s never outlined the details aloud, but Clint and Natasha are professionals, so they already know: the slightest sign of something going wrong, having gone wrong, about to go wrong, and Phil will shoot them, no questions asked. In the same way that none of them talk about it, none of them mind, because the same promise applies for all three of them, in every direction. They know it’s necessary. 

‘Compromised’ is their code, just for the three of them. It means more than for the average SHIELD agent: more than turned, it’s about reverting; it’s about regret, and anything that could send them over the edge.

Clint’s shaken in the weeks after the aliens don’t win, of course he is, but it isn’t about the loss of control – except it is that, of course it’s that, because Clint has spent his entire life trying to be free and having that taken away from him, and Loki knew that even as he twisted his fingers in Clint’s mind and made him like it. But despite the mandatory psych evaluations and follow-ups that go on for months, Natasha and Phil are the only ones to understand that those long nights spent curled up on rooftops and in air ducts are about how much he _didn’t_ lose control. Clint acted the same way he always has done; the same way he has on a thousand SHIELD missions, and on a thousand more before that with rather differently aligned employers. It may have been Loki calling the shots, but it had been Clint making them, and enjoying it as much as any other job.

Nobody else knows this, besides them: Clint _likes_ making those shots. Under Loki, he just didn’t have to feel bad anymore.

He’s had his post-hypnosis training. He won’t let himself sleep unless there’s somebody nearby to pull the trigger. Just in case.

If he isn’t ordered elsewhere, Phil sleeps behind him, hands curled around his wrists, comforting but undeniably there if something goes wrong. Even when the job intervenes and Clint’s back shivers in the sudden cold, Natasha sits in the room with him, far enough away that he can’t surprise her even if he tries (they both hate that, but it’s necessary without Phil), gun where he can clearly see it, and the only reason he doesn’t thank her is because she doesn’t need to hear the words. She just smiles at him, and wishes she could remember Russian lullabies. 

Clint is stubborn, subordinate and, for want of a better word, sassy. Both of them are used to this. Both of them will do whatever it takes to get that man back.

Natasha hates losing control; _hates_ it. The only people she cares about enough to make a difference can handle themselves, so her only weakness is – and always has been – herself. Loki jumped to conclusions, and she used it against him, the same as plenty of others before him. (She might feel bad about that, long after Clint is back and Coulson is safe and she can let herself feel again, now that she’s whole.) Natasha is only ‘compromised’ when she doesn’t know what to do. Her entire life has been mission after mission; orders run far deeper in her blood than Clint’s, and it shows. Her weakness is doubt. That’s how Clint got to her in the first place, miles from anybody else, SHIELD or Russian authority, even as she wanted to let the crazy American who thought he knew so much freeze to death in her country. 

Leaving Russia, she needed a new fixed point – a foundation. She’s built her new life on the two men who were willing to take her in. She trusts them enough to reveal when she’s lost. Clint only began to understand just what that meant in Budapest, when her life blood was pumping out of her leg into the dry ground, and through the dirty air that she hoped was just smoke, she gasped out the only words her struggling lungs and mind could manage: _I’ve been compromised._

He understood. She’ll always love him for that.

Clint will follow her anywhere, understand what she needs to hear, but Phil is the point in the world which she can always rely on not to change. Certainly she has little of the same faith in countries. He’s something similar for Clint, who has been on the run his entire life, but Natasha needs somebody to give her orders when the world keeps shifting underneath her. Cap doesn’t make a bad last-minute stand-in, when they have to save the world and there’s a gambit the two of them are only let in on because Fury knows they’ll either fall apart or break the world if he doesn’t tell them the truth, but this has been built on the three of them, and only Phil can truly fill that role.

Somebody steady. Somebody more permanent than the two of them, burning deadly and bright and always one step away from death. Phil will only be compromised if something other than his job came first, and considering that his life _is_ his job, the scenario seems unlikely at best.

Only one example exists: when Clint disobeyed a direct order and brought a Russian assassin home.

Phil claims that making a call for the good of the job is hardly ‘being compromised’, just a tactical decision. He knew Clint was good; he knew Natasha was, if anything, better. 

Fury has never called him out on it, because quite frankly the two specialists are not the real terrors of SHIELD – just the obvious ones.

Clint knows that Phil trusted him then as much as he trusts Natasha now. It’s pretty damn humbling, to realise the power you might have over a person without realising it. Natasha knows that she should be grateful, and oh God, she is. She is because she understands better than Clint how hard it can be, with your superiors breathing down your neck, to look into an enemy’s eyes and choose something else.

(Clint doesn’t realise just what it means that he’s able to talk both of them around. Needless to say, they never tell him.)

Phil doesn’t trust as easily as some people think, the same way he’s not the automaton imagined by others. He’s a good agent, which makes him sceptical, but also discourages isolation or delusions of grandeur and immortality. He’s the best, which means he always has a Plan B. Nobody really appreciates just what Agent Coulson could be capable of, and he likes to keep it that way, because maybe if they don’t know, he’ll never have to show them.

Long before Natasha, as hard as that is for them to imagine now, Phil taught Clint what it meant to be cautious about your own potential. (Natasha, beautiful, bloody and brilliant, was what made Clint scared.)

Sometimes Phil wonders if Natasha and Clint realise exactly what they mean to him. Clint certainly would scoff at the idea that Phil needs them just as much, especially now that he needs to feel pinned just to sleep. Natasha though; Natasha understands something of what it means to feel so close to being a machine. Phil lost touch with his family a long time ago, after he vanished into the bureaucracy and the black suits. While he has colleagues, even friends, it’s the two of them that he clings to when he awakens from dreams where he has no face, and no soul – where he becomes everything his sister used to scream about.

It’s a fine line, between feeling and falling the other side, but he forces himself to tread it. While it may hurt, he needs this. They all need something to cling to in the night. When he soothes Natasha in Russian as the sunlight starts to fall across their bed, her eyelids fluttering as she tries to escape sleep, he’s also drawing strength from having her close, from feeling needed and being seen as something other than an agent. 

He certainly knows that he couldn’t give either of them up – not unless they forced him to. They’re his weak point, and he is well aware of that. He likes to keep those aspects in clear view though, and they’re hardly fragile. The fact that his weaknesses support each other only shows that, even in this, he is nothing if not prepared.

The day Phil is compromised, when he cuts himself away from SHIELD, Clint and Natasha will disappear, because either they will be right at his side, or they’ll be the only ones they trust to get the mission done. The same applies if Clint goes looking for targets, or if Natasha decides the answers lie elsewhere. This never has to be stated out loud; it’s just obvious. Written into them like code, or blood.

Perhaps the two assassins could convince each other to run away and make their own world; that’s why they need the third. 

Natasha knows she came last, never stops being aware of it, and when Clint finally sleeps, she tries – with halting phrases and pauses that don’t sound like her at all, and lapses into older tongues for the concepts she never learnt – to let Phil know how grateful she is that they let her in. Phil, unconsciously still tracing paths on Clint’s skin but grey eyes fixed on her, seems surprised by the idea that anything else could have happened: matters were decided the moment Clint was about to take Phil’s bullet for her. 

( _She’s like me,_ he’d said, and Phil had known it was too late.)

Natasha’s nails and fists leave scars and bruises across Clint’s body, marks Phil traces with a finger and a disapproving eyebrow, but on those occasions she just grins and shows her own, and Phil knows they’re going to kill him, and he feels so relieved that he laughs, at himself and at their matching expressions of confusion. Besides, they both tend to mix affection with roughhousing, and Phil feels enough of the first to go along with the second. Clint thinks that they don’t know he traces those scars on missions, when he’s all alone and he has to remind himself that – impossibly – there are people that seem to care about him even half as much as he does about them. (Natasha knows, and leaves the scars for him. Phil knows, and tries to soothe them away.) Natasha is glad neither of them recoil from the only way she knows how to deal with people, just as she’s glad that thanks to them she’s learning something else. After all, it’s hardly violence that moves her to pursue Clint through the air ducts, for no other reason than because nobody else can, and Phil has a sixth sense for when he shouldn’t be left alone. Neither specialist will ever be normal, and Phil seems determined not to let them spiral downwards, so they have this strange little thing and it lets them joke and laugh and cooperate and trust that should the worse come to the worst, those bullets will still never miss.

In another world, Phil might have pulled the trigger; in another world, Natasha might have run; in another world, Clint might not have been there at all. None of them like to dwell on the could-have-beens, since things never turn out well there. Besides, they’re all practical, and none of them see the point in lingering on things that don’t matter.

(In those other worlds, they’re not together.)

Despite appearances, they keep each other stable, sane, and, above all else, keep themselves _good_ – as far as they can be. Together, it’s possible to relax and be who they are, without being afraid of who they might become, be it killer or cold-hearted machine.

Clint’s hand brushes Natasha’s, and she remembers a second chance; Natasha’s eyes catch Coulson’s, and there’s a risk he’s always willing to take; fingers tighten, Phil sighs in frustration, and Clint’s in a home he knows won’t try to tear him apart. 

Blood and breaths mingle together, and, more than love, all three of them think, _Trust._

\----------

(It’s a good thing Phil didn’t die that day.

God knows what they might have become then.)


End file.
